


Weapon of the Times - I

by starkraving



Series: Weapon of The Times [1]
Category: Halo, Red vs. Blue
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-03
Updated: 2013-12-13
Packaged: 2018-01-02 16:34:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1059083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starkraving/pseuds/starkraving
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Remember that it was a time of war, that you were made for war, that you were made exceptionally well for war. But, if nothing else remember this: Maine is not your first code name. You should tell your story from the start -- let's begin with the SPARTAN-II Program.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Wake

**Author's Note:**

> EDIT: 12/13/2013 - Dividing this into three chapters for easier readability. No new content has been added.

  

This is how you come back to the war.

Step one: Wake up dead. Wake up dead with a number laser-stamped into the meat of your tongue. That number is 24. Survive for 13.423 seconds. Your brain lights up, the insides of your skull unfolding into the bone-bowl of your cranium. Awareness is a needle -- a hypodermic shunt penetrating into the lizard core of your brain and delivering three CCs of a highly-volatile bio-synaptic serum that, unbeknownst to you, has liquefied seven skulls of gray matter prior to yours. The chemical cocktail hits the curdled sludge of cerebrospinal fluid -- fires a series of electrical pulses into the deadened folds of your brain and for 13.423 seconds the synaptic paths of your last memory fire up and you open your eyes and --

Step two: Immediately and violently go into cardiac arrest. Your heart -- heavy, artificially warmed and softened for weeks prior -- jackknifes in your chest and seizes. Scream. Scream for the whole 13.423 seconds that you’re alive. Scream like an animal being gutted alive -- the flayed roadwork of your veins pulsing with artificial and bio-cloned blood, semi-toxic with antigens and tissue hydration fluids, poison to any _living_ thing. There’s an oxygen mask strapped over your nose and mouth, force feeding purified air through a long tube fed down your gullet and up your nose into the back of your throat. Gag around the obstruction as your heart stops completely.

Step three: Die again.

***

Step four: Wake up. Survive for 24.5 seconds this time. Fail to understand what’s happening to you or why your entire existence is made of up of black and white -- the black’s on the inside of your head and the white’s in every nerve, every fiber, every molecule of your body which has been set on fire. Your guts are loops of rubber tubing, siphoning battery acid through your lower intestines. Your bones are cracking in their housings of muscle roped too tight to the carbide ceramic grafted into your skeleton. You are aware of the bones in your skull, of your teeth rooted in your head -- you are aware of them because they hurt.

Your eyes burn with tears and with medical gel -- you’re floating in a soup of it. You don’t know why. You don’t understand anything. You understand that your body is a slab of blood and bone and you’re trapped inside of it. Become frightened by these _noises_ that echo through the thick liquid soup around your head. Take 5.4 of your 24.5 seconds to realize those noises are coming from you. Take comfort in the sound of your own voice, impossibly deep, vibrating through the ossified structures of your bones and remember how to moan.

Step five: Feel, don’t see, the needles that punch through the skin and muscle at the base of your cervical and thoracic vertebra. Promptly piss yourself while the feeling goes out of your lower body, twitch and spasm as the needles start to twist inside your spine, spinning and they are not needles, they’re drills. It’s good you’re paralyzed because otherwise you’d snap your spine the other way and break off the drill bits in your vertebra.

They grind through the bones, until every fiber of your being is pulsing, glowing, throbbing with agony. The wirework of your nerves burning inside the envelope of your skin. You try to scream again, the muscles of your esophagus closing around the tubes in your throat, swallowing and gagging, your whole body flexing as the pain spreads through you, inhabits you, possesses every cell in your body and you’re screaming. Screaming to distract yourself. Screaming to make it stop. Screaming until your wordless thoughts spin out and --

_“Remember.”_

_Her voice is calm, familiar. It settles onto your skin and lies there until it sinks inside you as surely as the needles push through the muscles of your upper body, your ribs, your thighs, your calves, your neck. You can’t move as the technicians slide each needle one by one or dozens by dozens into the meat of your body, long burning lines of heat sitting inside you, the plungers not yet pushed. It hurts, but you don’t make a sound other than to breathe a little faster. You’re scared. You are scared. You don’t want to do this, you’re not ready for what comes next._

_“When you wake up. You will be given the best in medical attention to recover from the procedure. You will not be put into active service until such a time as we are satisfied that you will perform optimally in the field.”_

_You can’t nod. You can’t do anything. You can only blink, your eyes blurring, the bright orb of the surgical light blinding you to her face but you don’t need to see it to know it -- the beginnings of silver in her hair, the lines at the corners of her mouth. She’s in a white lab coat. She touches your forehead -- her palm against your brow warm briefly. She does not touch the recruits. She does not speak kindly to them. She does not look at you in any way but with calculation. Still, when the saline runs from the corner of your eyes, she touches your forehead and says,_

_“You’ve been called upon to serve. Survive. Then fight.”_

_The plungers drop and set your bones on fire and you --_

Step six: Die of shock.

_***_

Step seven: Wake up suspended horizontally beneath glass. The gel solution around you ebbs and siphons without weight, gathered into the thick Plexi-glass tube and set into localized anti-grav to create neutral buoyancy inside. Outside the glass, greenish blue squares and rings pulse gently, numbers running through the air in ribbons of holo-light, ringing your tank and throwing hazy blots of blue through the water. Become aware of voices, muffled, but becoming clearer. Someone is standing over your tank tapping and touching the hard-light readouts.

“Neurological functions spiking,” says someone. “He’s coming around.”

“Biometrics are stable.”

“Give him another dose and prep for physical.”

The tube in your throat hisses a little, chills, the contents pumping through it changing suddenly. You must breathe. Suck another lungful of painkiller. Inhale again. The lukewarm meat of your lungs inflates -- tastes like plastic and sour peppermint -- and deflates inside you. You breathe chemicals until your eyes roll back in your skull and every muscle in your body prickles with pins and needles. Your lips, toes and fingers numb instantly.

“Isolated zero gravity field holding. Adding gravity. Draining suspension gel.”

“Slowly,” says someone.

The liquid around you begins to recede -- an air bubble appearing at the top of the domed glass above you then dropping and dropping until your chest and face break the surface. The liquid drains out. You feel a flat platform beneath you, your body settling on a rubberized table as the liquid no longer supports you and gravity sets back in; this is the first time you’ve felt the weight of your own body and it’s stunning. It feels heavy, horribly heavy, thick and dull like you’re inside a suit. You’re naked, lying on your back beneath the glass and the dome splits at the middle and the two halves slide away.

There is a blue light overhead, many holo-graphic lights floating around the medical slab. You still can’t move. Your body is too heavy. The tubes in your throat keep feeding you oxygen, your chest expanding and contracting, expanding and contracting. People in white body suits and mirrored goggles and wearing white masks are standing over you. You can hear them. You can follow them with your eyes which are wide open.

“Should he be doing that?”

“Doing what?”

“He’s looking right at me.”

“Likely that it’s just reflex. The auto-doc needs to do a brain scan to confirm, but it doesn’t matter. Five days stable in a chemical coma, two years in cryo. It’s time to wake up.”

One of them activates a holo-light that runs down the length of your body, beeps, then comes back. While it scans, one of the doctors takes your hand, gently but firmly massaging their thumbs into the creases of your palms, flexing your fingers for you, rotating your wrist. The person doing this has on a mask and gloves; they don’t speak or even look at you. They are also the first human being to physically touch you since you’ve awoken and the feeling of another living thing, another skin and blood, warm and breathing thing, touching your skin -- it calms you.

There is nothing, for a moment, but the other person’s hands as they experimentally move your hand, bend your arm, press their palms down against the join of your shoulder to your chest. The impression of their palm against your upper pectoral seems to linger impossibly long. Wish for them to put their hand back on you. They make notes on a holo-screen by the medical slab and pick up a small hand-held scanner the shape of a baton. A thin band of light glows along its length, projecting a veil of blue holo-light. They run the scanner over your sternum, belly, groin, and back up to your head -- hovering just an inch off your skin, but near enough you can feel it disturbing the air.

“No rigor,” she says idly.

“There better not be,” says someone else. “Last thing we need is cryo failing.”

The same person moves down to your feet, massages at your ankles, bends your knees up. You feel their hands run up the back of your calf, gently press their fingers into the back of your knee, run their fingers into the dip around your kneecap. You still can’t move. The holo-lights keep moving, scanning, numbers unreeling into transparent windows. The person by the knees reaches between your legs, holding a scanner in their other hand. They cup your balls gently, squeeze, run their thumb over the skin, then press two fingers into the muscles of your inner thigh, near your penis, then down the inside of your thigh.

When she’s done, she logs something in the data-spool that spawns when she waves her hand over a holo-node in the medical slab. Feel nothing in particular about this. Simply wonder if she’s going to touch any other parts of you.

“You know, I remember this one,” says someone, a man outside your range of vision.

“Don’t be an idiot,” says the person, the woman, with the scanner. “There were only sixty-seven of them to begin with.”

“No but I remember him. He was one of the late bloomers. Remember?”

The person doing your examination finishes and gently straightens your leg again. The weight of your limbs seems to be a small effort for her to move. She says, “I remember him.”

“He used to joke around during training.”

“I remember.”

“All grown up now.”

“Shut the fuck up.” The person with their hand on your knee looks up at the technician opposite her. Her voice is incredibly quiet, but you can still hear her clearly. “He was _fourteen years old_ when the augmentation failed. What’s wrong with you?”

“I’m just saying…”

“Shut up. Both of you.” The third speaker is similarly masked. She activates a hard-light panel near your shoulder and begins to speak to the air. “No physical abnormalities. No signs of muscular atrophy or decay -- they managed to freeze this one at the moment of death? Isn’t that right?” She leans over you, pushes her gloved thumb and middle finger into your eyelid and the flesh beneath your eye, pushing it open as yet another light scans the interior of your skull through your eye, lighting up the inside of your head. “No signs of retina rejection or detachment. Computer -- occipital functions?”

_“Nominal,”_ says a voice. There is a small glowing person no bigger than a doll. He’s hovering on one of the hard-light dashboards that the doctor activated, hands behind his back, looking at you. “ _Subject 024 is exhibiting no signs of cone and rod decay, no damage to the visual cortex. Occipital capillary reversal is successful.”_

“How’s the rest of his head?”

_“Brain activity and impulse speed are below ideal thresholds. Damage to neural dendrites as a result of the reanimation serum is wide spread. Bioelectrical nerve transduction to shielded electron transduction has regressed to 30% and 60% below Program ideals. There is a high probability that --"_

“Just tell me if he’s fucking retarded, program.”

_“He is not ‘retarded’, doctor.”_

“Any neurological signs of Parkinson’s? Fletchers? We haven’t taken him off the muscle relaxants yet and it was the fibrification that killed him so let’s focus on the neurology, shall we.”

“Fibrification?” says someone.

_“The surgical and chemical alteration of bio-electrical nerve transduction to shielded electronic transduction -- this augmentation to Subject 024’s neural synapses was intended to increase reflexes by 300%. Anecdotal data from the original class of SPARTAN-IIs suggest marked increase in overall brain activity and intelligence. This augmentation also allows for the advance neural lattice implantation that makes a full AI bio-integration possible.”_

“What went wrong?”

_“Inconclusive. The auto-doc data logged an unexpected bio-electrical surge. In layman’s terms: A surgically induced stroke.”_

“We killed him,” says the doctor. “Surgical error. How’s that for simply put? Program, acknowledge previous directive.”

_“Yes, doctor. Subject 024 is already exhibiting higher function brain activity. His reflexes are simply no longer that of an ideal Program recruit. Scans of the audio cortex indicates possible damage to thought-to-speech patterning though he retains language cognition. Catalytic thyroid implantation does not appear to have sustained any damage during the reanimation process.”_

“Well, I guess we expected that. We should be glad all the physical attributes can be preserved. Log for the record that Subject 024 has, through post-mortem bio-engineering, accepted all augmentation procedures with the exception of -- wait.” The doctor looks at the glowing figure, her hand hovering over the holo-interface. “Did you say language cognition?”

_“Yes. Subject 024 is aware of and processing our conversation right now.”_

“His neural scans were non-nominal for synaptic retention. That’s impossible.”

_“No, it was simply an extremely unlikely possibility –”_

The woman has pulled her mask off. She’s leaning over you. She fits her whole hand to your jaw (because your jaw is so large it requires her whole hand) and pulls your face around toward her, her other hand lying flat against the top of your head. Her eyes are gray. Her skin is dark and pitted by imperfections, the lights causing shadows to catch in the dips and sinks in her complexion. She is the first human face you have seen. Find her mesmerizing. Study the shape of her mouth as she says something in another language, something unfamiliar. Track the small movements of her irises as she examines your face in the light of the holo-scanner behind her. 

“My God,” she says. “My _God_. You _do_ understand what I’m saying, don’t you? Just blink if you can.”

You can. Blink twice, fast.

“Call the Director.”

“ _Now_? Isn’t it a bit --?”

“Call him right now. Program, I want a muscle solution but not until I say. Give him a standard adrenaline spike now.” She looks at you. Don’t recognize the expression that molds the features of her face; fail to follow how they crease and press into each other, how her eyes hold you. Think that it’s an aggressive expression. Wonder if you’re going to die again. “Caleb?” she says. You don’t recognize that word. You think it’s a name. “Caleb-024? Do you recognize that name? Blink twice again if you do.”

Stare, open-lidded.

“That’s okay. Are you in pain?”

Blink twice.

“Program, dose him two standards K-Pax, nerve limiters only. Don’t dope him.”

There’s a pressure against the back of your head, a beep, and a dim coolness spreads from the point of contact to the rest of your body. Relax a little. The woman reaches over your face, presses a thumb into some kind of pressure-latch in the strap beneath your ear, the one holding your oxygen-mask to your face. There is a hiss as the vacuum holding the latex-foam edges to your skin depressurizes.

“You two,” she snaps. “Turn him on his side, I’m taking this thing out. Bring me the oxygen mask.”

“Doctor, you’re moving a bit --”

“Shut up and do as I say.”

The other two struggle to roll you onto your side. One must grab your shoulder, while the other grabs your hip and the back of your knee, throwing a significant amount of their body weight into the effort until the doctor activates partial anti-grav and they position you carefully on your side, one arm under your head, the other flat against the table beneath you. One tech holds your shoulder while the other holds your head and the doctor with the gray eyes slowly pulls the mask from your face, the slick length of the oxygen tube sliding out of your throat and over the flat of your tongue.

“Easy,” says the doctor softly when you begin to retch by reflex, when you twitch, jerking, your body flexing in on itself, every hair follicle tightening until goosebumps prickle across every inch of your bare skin. She does not stop extracting the tube from your esophagus, hand over hand pulling what feels like miles of rubber from your guts. “I know, I know. Easy, we’re almost done.”

You vomit immediately after the tube comes out, a sluice of chemicals and white chunks that smells of ammonia and rot and anti-bacterials and the stench makes you vomit again. You retch over and over until your eyes water and your stomach cannot possibly convulse on itself again, until your throat cannot possibly burn and ache anymore, until the terrible rattling growl of your breathing hitches into labored moaning and the silence in the room is deafeningly total -- broken only by your voice.

“Shhh. We’ve got you, Caleb.” The gray-eyed doctor takes off her gloves. She lays a bare hand against your face, her palm to your temple and she says, “It’s okay. It’s okay, I promise you, you’re okay.” Her skin is warm and dry, her thumb against the dome of your forehead stroking gently. “Just relax. Shh.”

“Doctor Sharma.” The female technician takes a cautious step forward. “Please let us bring in security. If we’re taking him off the muscle relaxants then we should have them up here --” She lowers her voice, but you can still hear her just fine. You wonder if she thinks you can’t. “We aren’t set up for a fully operational recruit. This was supposed to be a preliminary physical exam. We didn’t think he would be awake. Please. We don’t know where he is psychologically. He could be violent given his… his _state_.”

Doctor Sharma ignores her almost entirely.

“His _state_?” she says softly. Her eyes never leave your face. As transfixed by you are you are by her. Her mouth softens at the corners even as her tone takes an edge beneath its calm. “You mean alive? Thinking? Capable of understanding and cognition? Everything we had dismissed beyond the realm of possibility for our wash-outs? Everything they said we could never do? _That_ state?”

“He could hurt himself. We haven’t even completed a physical exam, doctor --”

“Don’t couch your cowardice in concern, Hart. We do not need security.” She remains where she is, with you, placing her other hand near your face, hovering just short of touching your eyelids, close enough that when you blink, your eyelashes brush her fingertips. “Make yourself useful: get something that will fit him and prep a de-contamination suite and iso-room.” The technician, Hart, doesn’t say anything else. She just looks at you, the mirror of her visor reflecting the holo-lights, then turns and quickly walks out of the room. Doctor Sharma hardly notices her going. “Look at those eyes,” she says. “I never thought…”

_“Doctor Sharma.”_ The medical AI is hovering behind her, translucent, haloed by blue. One of the male technicians places a clear plastic dome over your mouth and nose, hissing gently as it feeds air anew. It’s hard to look away from the AI -- how it glows, how it speaks.  “ _I’ve put in a call to the Director. He is asking for a status report.”_

“Tell him.” She hesitates, her eyes studying her own hand against your skin. Her expression is unfathomable as the surface of the sun. Her words mean nothing. Focus on the heat of her skin on yours. Close your aching eyes. “Tell him we have a candidate for his project.

***

Step eight: Breathe.

 


	2. Speak

They ask you what you remember.

Here is what you remember: The smell of something burning on the stove. The kick of a MA3 Assault Rifle against your shoulder. Someone kissing you good night, the color of the night-light on the wall -- soft blue. How to arm a type-four thermo-nuclear bomb. The difference between a Jiralhanae Brute and a Sangheii Elite. The habitable planets that make up the Epsilon Eridani System, Sol System, Sigma Octanus System, Urs System -- an unfathomable number of star systems laid out in your mind.

But what do you remember, they ask.

How to break a man’s neck, how to disarm an opponent that stands over seven feet tall, how to decapitate a Mgalekgolo Hunter and re-wire a car. How to drive a M808 Main Battle Tank. Where to put a knife -- just to the left of the spine, fourth lumbar down; the abdominal aorta -- if you want to kill a man. What vanilla ice-cream tastes like. What blood tastes like. What the inside of a type-5 star-cruiser looks like, the color of the Pacific Ocean, the smell of a cut orange, how to disassemble an M6F Handgun, how to cauterize a wound, how to --

But what do you remember?

Pieces.

What else?

Parts.

What else?

Not your name.

They have you assemble and disassemble an M6E handgun. Its weight is insubstantial in your hand, the electroless nickel finish a little dull beneath the overhead lights. You pull it apart and put it back together in under a minute. They take the weapon from you and ask you who taught you how to do that. The question arrests you. They ask you again -- who taught you how to do that? You study the floor, looking for an answer that isn’t there, but you’re too tall to avoid their eyes and they say, again, “Caleb, who taught you how to do that?”

A figure taught you. A blur. A voice shouting, a hand on your wrist, the smell of coffee and the taste of your own blood when you didn’t do it fast enough. No one taught you how to put this weapon together. You were born knowing. (But that’s not true.) The smallness of the room they keep you in has begun to bother you -- the sensation that everything is slightly too small for you -- your clothes, the bed, their questions, your skin over your skeleton as heat and restlessness builds inside you like pressure in a canister.

“Can you solve this equation?”

Yes.

“Can you recite the Alphabet?”

Yes.

“Name one of your classmates.”

Can’t.

 “What does UNSC stand for?”

United Nations Space Command.

“What does ONI stand for?”

Office of Naval Intelligence.

“What’s today’s date?”

Can’t.

“What’s your birthday?”

Can’t.

“What is the maximum ammo allowance for a MA5C Assault Rifle?”

Three-hundred-fifty-two rounds. Eleven thirty-two round magazines.

“What’s your favorite food?”

Ice-cream. You remember ice-cream.

“What flavor?”

Vanilla -- melted, not frozen, tipped back out of a bowl. Licking the rest from the bottom. 

“What is a SPARTAN?”

Can’t.

“What is a SPARTAN?”

_Can’t._

They let you sleep. They don’t turn the lights down though so you lie there, eyes shut, the florescent burn of the overheads glowing red through the backs of your eyelids.

***

You don’t like needles.

You’re woken up by someone speaking gently through an intercom, telling you to sit up on your bed and put your feet on the floor. You do, blearily, feeling ill-rested and achy. Your head throbs imprecisely in time with your heartbeat so you close your eyes against the overhead lights.

“We’re coming in, Caleb.” The voice belongs to Doctor Sharma -- you recognize her accent though you don’t know what it is. “Do not stand up. Remain seated and do as our technicians instruct. Nod if you understand.”

You nod. You wish they would not call you that. The door is on the far right-hand side of the opposite wall, adjacent to a large black observation panel. Thin wire-filaments invisibly honeycomb panel, not glass but a type of military-grade blast shielding, privacy filtering built in. You’ve never seen the window translucent, but you remember being in a glass case and you remember, sometimes, the glass would go dark and the light would go out.

The dark never bothered you, you think.

The door opens and a technician enters -- Hart and someone else. Over the intercom Doctor Sharma says, “We’ve been monitoring your vitals while you rested. We’re starting you on a regimen of vitamins to ensure your immune system is working at its peak. You’re still in a fragile state, Caleb. We don’t know how well or how fast your body will adapt to… activity, even activity as lenient as what we’re asking of you. This is to keep you safe. Do you understand?”

You nod.

Wonder why Doctor Sharma does not come into the room as well.

“Can… I come closer?” says Hart. You look at her, a little surprised by her question. What if you say ‘no’? What will she do? You think about it. It obviously makes her nervous because she adds, “It’s like the Doctor says:  we need to monitor you very closely. You were sick for a long time. We want to make sure you’re healing.”

‘Sick’.

You nod and she comes to stand by the bed you’re sitting on. You’re almost as tall as her, even sitting down. The other technician has a kit that he opens on the table behind her and he hands her what looks like a small snub-nosed pistol with a glass canister set into the back of it -- the canister is full of something light blue. The gun beeps gently when Hart primes it.

“Please look toward that wall,” she says.

You turn your head away from her, feel the cool nub of the gun against your neck, just below your jaw. There’s a hiss and a click from the gun, a pressure and a heat that spreads from the point of contact and makes your lips go a little numb. You shake your head a bit and Hart steps back, then seems to realize that she stepped back and comes close again. She checks your pulse, shines a light in your eyes, sets a dermal-node against your chest, asks you to tug the collar of your shirt down far enough for her to place it beneath your collarbone.

You think about her holding your hand in the exam room.

“Any discomfort?”

You shake your head.

She touches your throat, feels with her palm, her fingers tracking the cords of muscle down either side of your trachea. She scans from your chin down to the dip in your collarbone then looks at the readout, has you open your mouth so she can shine a light down the back of your tongue. “Still can’t speak,” she says, mostly to herself. “Just… raise your hand if something feels wrong. Okay?”

Nod.

She sets her scanner down and accepts a hypodermic from the other technician. You look at the wall again.

“Please hold out your arm.”

You do.

“Please relax your arm a little.” She waits. “Can you relax your arm?”

You look back at her, at the bare needle in her hands, then nod and flex your hand a little and consciously force the tension to go from your arm. She very quickly sets the needle against your skin and pushes it through into a vein. She pushes the plunger down, pulls the needle out and a bead of dark red runs down the crook of your elbow until she catches it with a pad of gauze. The pressure of her thumb against the crook of your arm is a small comfort. 

“Does it bother you?”

You look at her.

“Needles. Do they bother you?”

Yes. Yes, they bother you. You remember needles -- one of the last things you remember, the memory that fired itself alive through the frozen synaptic paths of your brain was of needles -- long, molecular-grade, surgical and as long as your hand from fingertip to wrist -- a dozen of them sliding down toward you. Panic hurts. You remember panic -- your heart slamming against your insides, your hands balled so tight the dull edge of your nails drew blood in your palms, your guts coiled, balls tight into your groin, unable to move, too scared to move, envisioning the needles slammed through the meat of your body, snapped off inside you, burrowing deeper and deeper, dragging trails of your blood into your guts. Your eyes sting remembering.

“Hey,” says Hart. “Hey, we can use an injection gun. It’s just harder to find a vein.”

You shake your head.

“It’s fine. I can use the injection gun,” she says, picking the gun back up. She fiddles with it. “You… always had a problem with needles, you know.” You shake your head again -- point to the hypodermics. She looks at them, then at you. “You’re sure?” You nod, once, hard, and she just looks at you for a long moment. Then, “Okay. Give me your arm. We have another half dozen or so. Raise your other hand if you begin to feel any nausea or disorientation. If at any point your need to throw up, just go ahead. If you lose vision at any point immediately signal me.”

Nod.

You don’t raise your hand. 

When they have taken blood, scans, and finished with the injections, Hart tells you to lie down and sleep for a few hours. She touches your shoulder as she goes and as she and the other tech reach the door one says, quietly, in that whisper they do when you’re not supposed to hear: “Does he remember --?” But Hart says, “Shh,” and the door closes behind them.

***

You try the door.

It’s locked -- or rather, it’s sealed from the outside -- 4000 pounds of hydraulic force jamming it irrevocably shut. You knew it would be, but you try the door anyway just to see how it will feel when you set your weight against it and the door does not give. You are after the small clench in your chest, the contraction of muscle and breath behind your sternum. You memorize that infinitesimal spike of adrenaline when you confirm -- not simply suspect -- that you are not allowed to leave.

Slight nausea follows, a vague coiling in your guts. The room feels a degree colder and emptier and it is already terribly empty. A mattress lying on top of a metal shelf, a squat toilet, and a flip-down sink.One wall made of honey-combed glass and industrial strength blast shielding. The knowledge someone is on the other side and, surely, when you go up to the glass in the middle of what feels like the night, someone sees you press your hand to the panel and try impossibly to see through to the other side.

Sit down, go back to sleep and try not to think about the inertia or the quiet -- how it’s moving into you like a chill and settling itself inside you. Lying still for too long makes you sick, makes your body ache to move, your mind buzz in its bone shell case.

The inertia is killing you, surely.

***

 

Look at your hands. You’ve got your elbows braced against your knees, your hands clenched slightly in front of you. How many times have you looked at your own skin now? There are video files buried in ONI-III’s vaults of you -- sitting in your iso-room, staring at your own hands for hours, stripping off the clothes they gave you, standing there staring down at yourself, trying to figure out the roadmap of hard tissue and keloid scarring that crisscrosses your skin.

Your fingers are scarred with long dark cuts -- long since healed -- that track up the back of each digit to the knuckle. The skin on the back of your hands looks like it was peeled up from where your wrist meets your palm, then stapled back down again. There are long, long, long single tracks – sealed scalpel cuts from the back of your wrists up your entire arm to your shoulders. The underside of your wrists appear to have been laid open -- two short parallel cuts from side to side on both wrists, the second intersecting with a third longer cut that terminates up toward your inner elbow. Your legs are no better. Your spine is a long angry trench of fused flesh. Your belly and chest are intersecting lines of scarring.

You have never seen live combat, they say.

They say a lot of things.

“Do you know who you are?” says Doctor Sharma.

They make you sit on the bed and order you not to stand while they speak to you. The glass is clear today. Doctor Sharma is on the other side. There is a desperation in you, you know, not to disappoint her. It’s not fair, this desperation. It’s just that she’s the only one you know. She and Hart are the only ones you know and the prospect of their not being around anymore leaves a pit in your stomach.

You still can’t talk.

Doctor Sharma has made a priority out of repairing the damage cryostasis did to your vocal chords but even after a few sessions at the auto doc the best you can manage is not much. It does not help that the words get jumbled in your head -- the order of them sometimes comes out wrong and you say, “ _Remember can’t I.”_ and _“Maverick recall twenty-six twelve.”_ So eventually you just say, _“Nothing.” “Dunno.” “Can’t.” “No. “Yes.” “Stop.” “Okay.” “Why?”_

“I said, do you know who you are?” says Doctor Sharma.

“ _No.”_

“Do you know what you are?”

_“Soldier.”_

“But do you know _what_ you are?”

Stare desperately, lost.

“What is a SPARTAN?

_Am I?_

“That is not an answer, Caleb. That is another question. What is a SPARTAN?”

_I am._

“No you are not. I am asking you what a SPARTAN is, Caleb, and you are guessing. What is your occupation, Caleb-024?”

_“War.”_

“Really? Do you recall what we have taught you of war?”

Don’t answer. They know this already -- what you know of the war. They have run you through this. There are holes in what you know -- sections shorn from the fabric of your memory. They know that you cannot answer their very specific question. You have a sense that whatever a SPARTAN is, everything you are is bound up in that and the acid you taste when they won’t tell you what it means -- it’s poisonous. Your anger is on the knife edge of your tongue, blunted by the lag between your thoughts and how they transcribe to your mouth.

Allow yourself to become visibly frustrated -- hands clenching on the edge of the mattress, gazing at Doctor Sharma. Her face is unreadable. She picks up a datapad from a table and thumbs something on the screen. The viewing panel spawns up a holo-screen. With no preamble a video queues up and plays:

There is a classroom; it’s being shot from a high-angle like there is a camera set high in the upper corner. The class has tiered desks, a recessed podium on the bottom level where a man in a uniform is standing and speaking to a class of children. They are all sitting quietly attentive. The man is older, balding, his face craggy and his steps as he paces the small floor loud enough to be heard on the audio-track.

He is saying, “When most UNSC men and women talk to you about a halo-drop they are referring to an in-atmo high-altitude drop from somewhere between 15,000 and 35,000 feet.” He comes to a stop. “That is not what it will mean for you.”

“They’re gonna make us jump from way higher, aren’t they?”

The boy who spoke up is wrinkling his nose. You find yourself making the face yourself, just to try it out. The observers, if they notice, do not comment.

The class instructor is pointing. “You. Stand the fuck up.”

The boy cringes.

“Stand the fuck up.”

The other kids in the class don’t really react beyond staring. Several of those nearest him look at their desks to avoid looking at him. The boy looks around, like his fellow classmates might do something to protect him, but when it’s obvious they aren’t going to he heaves a kind of exaggerated sigh and stands up. He stands at attention, chin up, hands lightly clenched at his sides, looking straight forward. The instructor has a baton in his hand. The instructor comes up the tiers to the desk where the boy is standing. The boy keeps his eyes forward. He keeps his eyes forward until the last minute. Then he looks at the instructor and says,

“Officer Mendez, what if I’m scared of heights?” And grins.

His grin is promptly obliterated by the small, muffled whine of pain that jolts out of him. The smile cracking into bared teeth and contorted features. The instructor, Mendez, is entirely unreadable; he has jammed the tip of the baton into the boy’s ribs. The baton is loud, makes a taser’s loud snapping sounds, the current ripping through the boy’s small body and just as it seems he could not possibly remain on his feet any longer, the instructor stops and the boy falls against his desk, gasping, sniffing in pain. He sobs a little, stops, stands back at attention. 

“Still scared of heights?”

“No, sir.”

“You ask intelligent questions, Caleb-024. You are not an idiot, or a clown. Don’t waste the time of your teammates and most importantly do not dare waste my time. Is that understood, soldier?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then sit down.”

He sits down. Mendez turns his back. The boy, Caleb, you, immediately sticks his tongue out and one of the kids across the room snorts, claps a hand over their mouth and tries to pretend they didn’t do anything. Several kids are biting their lower lip, squirming. Most of them are already ignoring him. The video stops. The holo-display vanishes.

“How does that video make you feel?”

How does it make you _feel_? You stare at the blank viewing panel for a long moment, your hand on the bed next to it -- you notice your hand is tight. When did your hand become a fist? The sinews that shift beneath your skin as you lay your hand flat, the pulse of your own heart in the cavern of your chest -- you can take a comfort in the rhythm and structure of your own body, even in the scarring that tracks you from head to foot, but you do not know how the boy on the screen makes you feel. Fail to recollect the brutality -- you don’t remember the voltage as it snapped through your bones, clenching your muscles so tight it was enough to make you scream out, enough to make you cry.

_“Confused,”_ you say at last.

“Do you understand who the boy in this video is?”

You nod.

“But you do not remember this incident?”

You shake your head.

“You do not know what a SPARTAN is?”

Shake your head.

“Do you feel you could fight if we asked it of you?”

“ _Yes_.”

“Are you prepared to die, Caleb?”

Frown. Wait for her to elaborate, but she does not.

“I said: Are you prepared to die for --?”

_“Yes.”_

“We killed you, Caleb.” The way she says it -- the coldness, how she looks at you -- arrests you. 

This is obviously not part of what she is supposed to ask you because one of the masked technicians -- it sounds like Hart -- steps forward and says, “Doctor Sharma, you can’t --!”

“You died because we killed you,” she says again, louder. “You died in extreme pain on an operating table when you were fourteen years old and then we sent the real SPARTANs, your classmates, the ones who were _stronger_ and _better_ than you, we sent them to die and they have died, Caleb. So are you still ready to die for--?”

A black man in a blue suit steps forward and speaks over her. “What Doctor Sharma is _trying_ to say is that will be all for today. Thank you, Caleb.”

The viewing panel goes dark again. You must force yourself to remain still, seated where you are without reacting. Only after you determine an appropriate length of time has passed to not react, the amount of time it would take all observers save the automated ones to leave… fall back into your cot and press your hands against your eyes. Moan until the moan is a shout caught up in the damage to your throat. Roll over and try to sleep again. Do not let yourself get up and go across the room. Do not press your hands to the glass and hope it clears up again.

Lay still.

_Are you still ready to die for us?_

Wish they would stop calling you Caleb.


	3. Run

You can see in the dark.

They turn out the lights for you now when you ask them to, though your door remains locked until you are called on and you can hear people talking about you when they think you can’t hear them. You have 15/20 vision and can dead lift 1000 pounds. Last week they administered a hearing test and you faked your results, pretended to miss small tones when, in fact, they were clear to you as any conversational sound. This was your first deceit and later, after you had done it, you laid in your bunk in the dark and you thought about what you had done, about the untruth, and how it settled in your heart.

It does not disturb you.

You do not fake during any of your other training exercises though.

They test your stamina first. Soldiers open the door to your room one day and Doctor Sharma asks you to go with them. She promises that one day they will see there isn’t a need for guards with guns, but for now you follow them from your room. Today they don’t take you to another interview room or the medical suite. This time is the longest distance you have walked inside the facility where they are keeping you and there are other people. They stare when you pass. Your guards are all a head shorter than you and when you walk the weight of your steps makes the patter of their booted feet on the bulwarks seem tiny.

You don’t mind the guards. You listen.

“That’s him right? The one they --?”

“-- really a SPARTAN? Is that what they look like out of --?”

“-- fucking creepy.”

“Stop staring. He’ll --”

“Ever wonder if everything about them gets bigger when --”

“MAC interface is on the fritz again. Tell the captain --.”

 “Engineering’s all fucked up. FTL drive crew is understaffed. Cry me a river.”

“-- would climb that like a fucking tree. God _damn_ \--”

“We lost so many SPARTANs already. ONI-II needs to come up with something or --”

“-- should put a bullet through its --”

“C-deck seems to have leak in the cryogenics ward. Can you --?”

“Need more personnel to cargo hanger four. Carter went and skated a fucking Albatross over the --”

“Did we pick up a SPARTAN during our last in-board? I thought we --”

_“Attention all hands. Link-rail three is currently out of service for maintenance. Please use link-rail two and five to access decks A-4 through C-4.”_

By the end of the five minute walk from your room to your destination you know a lot more than you did before. You know that you’re on a Charon-class light frigate and you know this about the Charon-class: they are manufactured by the UNSC, have Naoto Technologies V4/L-DFR engines and run a Series IV CODEN/SFTE -- a standard slipspace drive. Sixty centimeters of Titanium-A battle plate skin the beast against the vacuum of space. It’s at least 490 meters long, 155 meters wide and forty-five stories tall. The crew is at least fifty persons large and no more than two-hundred persons in total. The AI from the medical wing is likely the ship’s AI.

You’re on a UNSC ship dedicated to the Office of Naval Intelligence, likely at a higher level of clearance than ONI-II.

This is what you know in five minutes.

The guards bring you into a room with a large treadmill where Doctor Sharma is waiting. She asks you to jog for as long as you can on a treadmill. They have you strip your shirt so Hart and other technicians can attach dermal sensors to your chest and temples and while they are attaching them Hart says to you, she says, “You’re going to be fine. Don’t hurt yourself.” Then they have you get on the treadmill and turn it on beneath you.

You run for four days straight. You could have run for longer but by the beginning of the fourth day Doctor Sharma orders you off the treadmill and escorts you under armed guard to what appears to be a hangar bay-sized training room. There, a rubberized 400 meter circuit runs around the perimeter of the room. There is a scanner set up near the starting line. The blue AI from the medical ward is hovering on a holo-node near the door.

 _“The equipment is prepped,”_ it says.

Doctor Sharma leads you to the starting line. You are aware of the soldiers with their rifles, of the technicians watching. You hear one of them whisper, “I can kind of see it.” and when the other one expresses his confusion they elaborate. “That he was fourteen. Doesn’t he still kind of look like a fucking kid? Just, like, bigger?”

But Doctor Sharma doesn’t hear them. She has you follow her, your muscles still warm only vaguely aching from ninety-six hours of light jogging -- an effort not made difficult from a lack of sleep. You aren’t tired. Your heart in your chest has already begun to normalize its rate in the short time it took to walk from the previous lab to this room. Your pulse immediately quickens again when Doctor Sharma tells you to stand at the starting line. A nervous tension enters your stomach.

You’re excited.

Then Sharma says, “Run.” When you look at her -- uncertain and eager -- for direction, she adds, “Run as fast as you can for as long as you can. Run until you can’t. Run until you _hurt yourself_ if you think you have to. Just run and don’t disappoint me, recruit.”

And you are gone.

You take off sprinting from the starting line and the moment the ball of your foot hits the rubber coated runway something sparks hot from your core and the folded pathways of your brain ignite blue and you taste blue and the world collapses in on itself and -- _run._ Your body knows how to do this, you fall into instinctive runner’s form -- weight forward, hands relaxed, arms and legs alternating as mechanically as pistons spinning on a rail. The air in the hangar roars past you, thundering in your ears as you hit your stride and round the circuit. As you pass the scanner at the starting line it pings and you hear the AI say, “ _30.34 seconds.”_  

You’re running, but you’re not breathless yet. You run faster. The world does not blur but it speeds up -- rushing past you like film pushed to fast forward and in the crystal-clear frames of your peripheral you see the soldiers pointing and shoving each other. You pass the starting line again.

“ _25.82 seconds._ ”

You’re running 34mph. You can’t go any faster. Your body will not pump your legs any quicker, will not push off the ground any harder, propel you any farther forward than the flat out momentum of your sprint has already pushed you -- exhale, exhale, inhale -- the sync of your breathing to the pace of your strides makes a rhythm to your running and you hold it. You make a machine of your body and like a metric, like a mechanism, you run and run and run until the narrow focus of the world tunnels to the rubber strip of the track and the baseline of your breathing. The thud-thud-thud-thud-thud of your feet against the floor. The AI saying _“25.56 seconds.”_ And you round the circuit again and again and again -- the sounds of the rest of the ship muting themselves _“25.53 seconds.” “25.71 seconds.” “25.85 seconds.”_ \-- until something changes in the chemistry of your movement and begins to burn. Your lungs first, then your throat, the burning spreading like a toxin from your chest to the rest of your body until your skull is throbbing with blood and pressure and you push through it. Ignore it. _“26.01 seconds.”_

“Do not stop!” Sharma. She’s shouting at you. “Do not stop, Caleb. That is an order! Keep going!”

_That is an order._

She keeps calling you Caleb. The surge of anger at the name is enough to clock you next circuit at “ _25.35 seconds_ ” and you’ve been running for three minutes straight at 34mph and it’s starting to hurt you. You keep going. Your muscles are seizing now, beginning to cramp up, tarred with lactic acid and straining like rubber bands stretched too tight. It hurts. The sinews of your body drawn taut against the framework of your bones. Your heart beats battery acid, your lungs beginning to flay themselves with every breath and you can’t keep your rhythm.

It hurts but you keep running -- you keep going. You run and you run until you feel something seize from the back of your right ankle to the back of your knee and the pain is so startlingly total it breaks your stride and, traveling the speed of a car on a back road, you trip and hit the ground skidding. Your hands hit the ground first, your right palm slamming down and then your right shoulder as your elbow buckles to your momentum and you flinch because you expect the scraping pain of skin shearing off in the friction, but you hit the ground rolling and what you feel is the pain of the impact as you bounce then skid to an ungainly stop some thirty meters up the track.

Your run ends with you lying on your stomach with one arm under your head and the other under your chest -- head throbbing, body aching, but otherwise undamaged.

“Christ, did you see how fucking fast he went?”

You lever yourself up onto one knee.

“How did that not snap his neck?”

“Aint human, that’s how.”

Shake yourself, breathe. The gasoline burn in your lungs is already fading, the ragged sucking of your breath smoothing back into normalcy while the great fist of your heart in your chest slows and slows and you breath in and -- you laugh. It’s a grainy, booming sound that shakes through your whole skeleton. You like it. You keep laughing and your laughter eclipses the words of the soldiers who say you’re not human. You have enough context to know that should disturb you. You lack enough context to care that it does not disturb you.

 “Why are you laughing, Caleb?” Doctor Sharma, flanked by two assault rifles, is standing over you. You look up at her and you don’t know the expression on her face. “Why are you laughing?”

It takes you a moment to catch your voice. “ _Was. Fun.”_

“Fun?” she repeats.

You sense only after you’ve said it that was not the right thing to say. You stop smiling. Doctor Sharma leans down so she can study your face -- the gray of her eyes tracking your features like there is something in them she hadn’t expected. You don’t move when she extends a hand towards you. You let her fit three fingers under your chin, allow a small internal shiver pass through you when she says, gently, “You will have to do much better than that, Caleb.”

She grips your chin between her thumb and forefinger, the pad of her thumb caught against your lower lip. She leans very close to you, so close you think she shouldn’t be that near to you. Don’t move. The pounding of your heart is not just the adrenaline of the run anymore. 

She’s so close to you, her words are air moving against your mouth when she whispers, so low you know it’s meant just for your hearing: “You will never be allowed to join them. If they send you out to fight, they will never let you work with real SPARTANs.” She never breaks eye contact. “You’re not good enough.”

She lets go of you.

“You’re injured,” she says. “No more sprint training today. Walk it off.”

Sharma stands up and leaves you to a cool-down lap, ignoring how you stare after her, startled by the viciousness of what she just said. The betrayal takes a moment to settle in. Carry it with you back to the starting line where, between one heartbeat and the next, it becomes _anger_. Doctor Sharma is on the other side of the room, speaking with the AI near the door. She’s too far away to stop you when you take off again, sprinting. You hear her shouting at you. Ignore her.

She stops you at the starting line when you circle back to it, shouting at you when you skid to a stop twenty meters past her. 

“I told you to stand down!”

Shrug. Walk past her, off the track.

“You think that was good enough? You have no idea what a real SPARTAN can do.”

Shrug again.

“You’re going back to iso. You’re done.”

“ _23.02 seconds,”_ says the AI as you exit.

“Program, offline. _Now_.”

 

***

They leave you in your room for three days with the lights off for a significant portion of that time. The ship’s AI pops up sometimes from the holo-node set in the upper back corner of the room over your bed. When it appears it’s often to ask if you are feeling ill, any headaches or nausea. It’s been three days since you ate. You’re not very hungry but you’re bored and you can’t sleep the time away. It’s five days later and you realize what is happening, when you wake up with a gnawing in the pit of your stomach and the AI says,

“ _How are you feeling today, Caleb?”_

They are seeing how long you can go without food.

On day thirty-five, they shut off the water in your room.

Every day, the ship’s AI asks you to get up, come stand in front of the observation panel and hold still for a duration of fifteen to forty seconds -- the time it takes it to complete whatever scans they are doing to determine how your body is dealing with its new-found stressors. You combat the dehydration and discomfort by sleeping as much as possible, by lying still, conserving energy, burning as few of whatever calories remain within you to burn toward the continuation of your life.

You wonder if they would really kill you. You wonder if there is some length of time a real SPARTAN would be able to survive and whether they will let you die for falling short of it. You sleep on your side, your back to the door, trying to ignore the ache inside you or how it hurts to swallow or the persistence and growth of fear within you. Fear comes to you slowly, a gradual build as your reflection in the observation panel changes.

“ _You will not die,”_ says the AI.

You open your eyes and turn over. The AI is at the foot of your sleeping pad, looking at you, its arms folded behind its back. It’s been fifteen days.

“ _Do not be afraid. You are more than human. You will not die of this.”_

The AI does not leave this time.

Your throat hurts so you point at him, the AI, then at the floor, tilt your head.

 _“I will remain to keep you company if you wish it. Nothing about this test is to evaluate your psychological reaction to isolation. I am electing to open communication in accordance with permission granted by technical overseer Hart, our project overseer, and the ship’s Captain. I do not have the authority to do more than speak with you.”_ He means he has no sway to stop the test. A window of holo-light opens beneath the avatar’s feet, spawns a keyboard angled toward you. The AI nods courteously. _“I am here to answer questions. You needn’t try to speak.”_

You spell ‘name?’ and nod at the AI.

 _“My name is Ellis. Thank you for asking. You will note, not everyone uses that designation. I would like you to know, that I find it rude when I am not addressed by my given name so, again, thank you for asking.”_ The AI tilts its head at you, the features of the avatar shifting into unmistakable concern. _“I would also like you to know that I disagree with the methodology of your training. Personally, I mean. I have been tasked with explaining it to you.”_

_Why you?_

_“Because the other qualified overseers of this project are currently engaged in other matters and I am fully informed of both your history and the history of the project to which you are assigned.”_

_Doctor Sharma?_

_“Is otherwise engaged. We asked you a question before. We asked you what a SPARTAN is. You indicated that you do not know. Yet you remember military tactics and weapon maintenance, star systems and UNSC military structure, Earth history, the Human-Covenant war. The medical teams have expressed confidence that, given time to recuperate and be put back on training regimen, that you may recover back to full physical ability though we have yet to test the full limits of what you can do.”_ Ellis regards you in the only manner he seems capable of: calmly. He says, “ _Do you understand what happened to you?”_

Yes.

No.

You hold his gaze. The manner in which your throat aches, suits the words: “ _I died.”_

Ellis’ tone reasonable and without drama. _“Many people die and come back, Caleb. Your term in limbo was simply of a longer duration. You were resuscitated. This is not so remarkable. What is remarkable is the nature of the damage that afflicts you -- specifically, the lack of significant damage at all. It should come as no surprise that you are an anomaly. I may understate the medical advancements required to cure most illness, but I cannot understate how remarkable your recovery is to those overseeing you.”_

A pause.

“ _I have observed that you object, however minutely, to being called by the designation ‘Caleb’. According to your personnel files, your rank is still SPARTAN. Do you protest to my calling you SPARTAN-024?”_

_No. Like that._

_“I thought you might.  I find calling things by their right name is important. Do you agree?”_

You think about it.

_Yes._

_“SPARTAN-024, your situation is unique in the history of humanity. There is a debate right now as to whether you can operate as you are and where you would be best put to use. The debate is a matter of resources and the allocation of those resources and you, SPARTAN, are an exceptionally rare resource of which humanity has great need. Since the moment you woke, the debate has begun and while there are a great many variables at play, the core of the argument is simply whether or not you should be allowed to fight. Or be kept here for research purposes.”_

You don’t respond. A response might prompt him to stop telling you things. A response might signal to him that you have something you want to say and you do, but not at the cost of his ceasing to tell you about yourself. Until now you could only draw conclusions as to why they value you, why they woke you up. You understand that you are not what they expected. You understand that they are still deciding what to do with you. You understand that your position is fluid and that, at anytime, someone will make a decision about you and that decision may have everything to do with what you say here.

 _“I know this process has been difficult for you. So I will summarize as best I can: You were a soldier of the UNSC, though I know you have already drawn that conclusion. Specifically you were part of an ONI-III military program. You had completed the term of your basic training and were to be deployed to active duty after a final series of medical procedures and augmentations designed to enhance your physical attributes and prepare you for special equipment usage in the field.”_ He studies your eyes _. “During the procedure you suffered complications and were put into cryostasis until such a time that we could revive you.”_

They keep using that word, ‘cryostasis’, but it’s the wrong word. You weren’t in stasis. Stasis is kinder word.

_“Do you understand so far?”_

You nod.

 _“Humanity is still at war with the Covenant. This war has lasted for all the time that you were in stasis -- a term of two years -- and we are losing. Humanity as a species is losing.”_ The AI is very calm telling you this. _“You were one of seventy-nine trainees hand-selected to be SPARTANs, called to serve and protect humanity and its worlds from an enemy that means our eradication.”_ He waits, gauging your reaction. _“This doesn’t frighten you.”_

It’s not a question.

You shake your head.

_“Does it surprise you?”_

Again, shake your head.

_“Would you like to hear more about SPARTANs?”_

How do you explain to him, without words, that ‘yes’ you want to know about SPARTANs -- this word that holds the bounds of what you are and the evolution of your design because, Twenty-Four, you know that you were _designed._ You were designed to be seven feet tall, three-hundred pounds, your body in-laid with scars. You were meant to sleep lightly, recover fast, wake up restless. You were engineered for a purpose and every time the counselor says ‘SPARTAN’ something inside your blood seems to heat up, your whole body aching to the molecular level to fully understand that word.

That word, you’ve decided, is you.

More than anything else they have ever called you.

SPARTAN.

Yes.

_“You are not from the first generation of SPARTANs. The first class SPARTANs and the second class, yourself, were conscripted to your task as children and trained to your purpose. There has never been a matter of choice with generation one. You are the first of your generation where the question is being considered as relevant.”_

_Question?_

Ellis blinks his holographic eyes. _“Do you want to be a SPARTAN?” When you don’t say anything he adds, “Do you want to fight?”_

 _“I want…”_ You have to stop, your throat clenching around the words. Ellis waits. _“I want to fight.”_

_“And you are sure?”_

_“Yes.”_

_Ellis smiles. “I thought so. It seemed clear to me that you want to be a SPARTAN.”_

Your throat is stripped. Use the keypad this time: _Why?_

 _“All things want for purpose. As an AI I was tasked from creation with my purpose. I imagine it’s very confusing for humans to struggle with what their purpose is. I have never known this struggle. Most SPARTANS, similarly, do not know this struggle. Their purpose was laid out for them.”_ Ellis flickers a little, dimming slightly. _“Your purpose was to be a SPARTAN. Choosing to be one is a rare thing, Twenty-Four.”_

You sit forward.

_Will you stay?_

_“Yes, of course.”_

_Until I fall asleep._

_“I won’t leave you, SPARTAN-024. I can stay.”_

They turn on the water again three days later and start you up on a high-caloric vitamin soup before swapping back to a regular nutrient diet. Doctor Sharma appears again three days after the termination of the starvation test. She says, “A real SPARTAN could have lasted another week, Caleb.”

You think she was on the losing side.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading. This story is for all the Agent Maine fans out there who want to know what happened to the dude, how he joined Project Freelancer, how he became the Meta and basically his story from his point of view from start to finish. Any feedback or critique or reactions in general are much appreciated and any Agent Maine love shall be extremely reciprocated. Maine is one of my favorite Freelancers. Here's to the team heavy. <3


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